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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (45537)	11/22/2008 3:59:07 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Obama Targets 2.5 Million Jobs With Stimulus Plan (Update1) By Edwin Chen and Jason Gale Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) -- President-elect Barack Obama said he aims to save or create 2.5 million jobs in a two-year plan to stimulate an economy facing a “crisis of historic proportions.” “It’s likely to get worse before it gets better,” Obama said today in his weekly radio address. He said that this week “financial markets faced more turmoil,” potentially leading to a “deflationary spiral” that may plunge the nation further into debt and cost millions more jobs. The economic slowdown has been exacerbated by the worst credit crisis in seven decades. More firings will weigh on the economy and consumer spending, putting pressure on Obama and Congress to agree on legislation that will stimulate growth. The incoming 44th president is expected to announce, as early as Monday, his economic team, to be headed by Timothy Geithner, head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as Treasury secretary. Others include Jacob Lew, former President Bill Clinton‘s White House budget director, who will serve as National Economic Council director; and Peter Orszag, head of the Congressional Budget Office, who will be the next White House budget director. Swift, Bold Action Obama hailed this week’s enactment of a $6 billion extension of unemployment benefits, and said more needs to be done, and quickly. “We have now lost 1.2 million jobs this year, and if we don’t act swiftly and boldly, most experts now believe that we could lose millions of jobs next year,” Obama said. Obama opened his weekly address with a litany of grim economic developments. New home purchases in October were the lowest in half a century and 540,000 more jobless claims were filed last week, the highest in 18 years, he said today. “And now we risk falling into a deflationary spiral that could increase our massive debt even further,” the president- elect said. Obama said he and his top economic advisers will be working out the details of an “economic recovery plan” that will be “big enough to meet the challenges we face that I intend to sign soon after taking office” on Jan. 20. Nationwide Effort “It will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jumpstart job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy,” Obama said. “We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels; fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead.” The initiatives will address “this immediate crisis” and represent “long-term investments in our economic future that have been ignored for far too long,” he said. Obama also said in his radio address he would seek input from Republicans as well as Democrats. “But what is not negotiable is the need for immediate action,” he said. The president-elect’s address was also recorded on video and was posted on the official presidential transition website - - change.gov -- at 6 a.m. New York time today. To contact the reporters on this story: Edwin Chen in Chicago at echen32@bloomberg.netJason Gale in Singapore at j.gale@bloomberg.net Last Updated: November 22, 2008 09:47 EST

To: RetiredNow who wrote (45537)	11/22/2008 4:49:48 PM
From: koan	Respond to of 149317

If we let the auto industry go into bankruptsy, China may well buy a lot of there assets. So what if we do need the manufacturing facilities for a war, do we just tell China we are taking over their property. Then we would have to fight China too-lol. People need to think this through. One of four posters here has a saying on his personal page "begin with the end in mind". Amen.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (45537)	11/22/2008 6:12:31 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

from one of Obama's top economic advisors who teaches at UC Berkeley... tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com Why We're Rescuing Wall Street and Not the Auto Industry: Citigroup Versus General Motors By Robert Reich - November 22, 2008, 1:29PM Citigroup was once the biggest U.S. bank. General Motors was once the biggest automaker in the world. Now, both are on the brink. Yet Citigroup is likely to be rescued within days. General Motors may not be rescued at all. Why the difference? Viewed from Wall Street, Citi is too big and important to be allowed to fail while GM is simply a big, clunky old manufacturing company that can go into chapter 11 and reorganize itself. The newly conventional wisdom on the Street is that the failure of the Treasury and the Fed to save Lehman Brothers was a grave mistake because Lehman's demise caused creditors and investors to panic, which turned the sub-prime loan mess into a financial catastrophe -- a mistake that must not occur again. So, by this view, the government must do everything and anything to keep Citi alive. But GM? GM is just ... jobs and communities. The Street's view of the world is fundamentally flawed. Banks are important to the economy because they're financial "intermediaries." They connect savers with investors and borrowers. This is a vital function, but there's nothing magical about it. At any given time the world contains a vast pool of money that can be put to all sorts of uses. Financial intermediaries simply link the pool to the uses. To be sure, savers need to believe that intermediaries are trustworthy; otherwise, savers will prefer the underside of their mattresses. That's why governments regulate intermediaries, insure deposits, and do whatever else needs to be done to make savers feel safe. What governments and societies fear most are "runs" on banks -- panicked efforts by depositors to pull their money out all at once, before banks can possibly collect the money from all those who have used it to borrow or invest. That's what happened in the 1930s. But the current panic on Wall Street is not a "run" in this sense. It has almost nothing to do with banks' roles as financial intermediaries. It's a run on the shares of Wall Street banks, not a run on the pool of savings they oversee. The mutual funds, pension funds, and deposits they hold are perfectly safe. Before the asset bubbles burst, financial institutions were generating whopping profits, so naturally they attracted many investors and creditors. After the burst, the profits disappeared and their share prices plunged. These days, you'd be hard pressed to find many people who want to invest in or lend to financial institutions. So what? You'd be just as hard pressed to find people wanting to invest or lend to the auto companies. Lehman's demise cost many investors and creditors lots of money, but they were investors and creditors in Lehman, not in the real economy. Citigroup had a market value of $274 billion at the end of 2006. Now its value is about $21 billion. That's awful news for Citi, its executives and traders, and its investors and creditors. But it's not necessarily awful news for the economy as a whole. Even if Citigroup were to go belly up, the real economy would not be seriously harmed. The funds overseen by Citi would remain; fund managers would shift them to other banks. So Citigroup is not much different from General Motors. It's a company that once made lots of money but, through a series of management blunders, is now losing money big time. Citi's shareholders and creditors are taking a beating, just like the shareholders and creditors of GM. So why save Citi and not GM? It's not at all clear. In fact, there may be more reasons to do the reverse. GM has a far greater impact on jobs and communities. Add parts suppliers and their employees, and the number of middle-class and blue-collar jobs dependent on GM is many multiples that of Citi. And the potential social costs of GM's demise, or even major shrinkage, is much larger than Citi's -- including everything from unemployment insurance to lost tax revenues to families suddenly without health insurance to entire communities whose infrastructure and housing may become nearly worthless. I'm not arguing that GM should be bailed out; as I've noted elsewhere, GM's creditors, shareholders, executives, and workers should have to make substantial sacrifices before taxpayers should be expected to sacrifice as well. Nonetheless, Citi is about to be bailed out while GM is allowed to languish. That's because Wall Street's self-serving view of the unique role of financial institutions is mirrored in the two agencies that run the American economy -- the Treasury and the Fed. Their job, as they see it, is to keep the financial economy "sound," by which they mean keeping Wall Street's own investors and creditors reasonably happy. Because the public doesn't understand the intricacies of finance, it's easily persuaded that this definition of "soundness" is the same as keeping savings flowing to the banks so that the banks can lend to them to Main Street. That's why the public and its representatives have committed $700 billion of taxpayer money to Wall Street and another $500 to $600 billion of subsidized loans to the Street from the Fed -- bailing out the investors and creditors of every major bank, including, any moment, Citi -- only to discover, at the end of this frantic and unbelievably expensive exercise, that American jobs and communities are more endangered than they were at the start.